the people at the
conclusion of the Dacian war. If the younger Gordian collected together
bears, elks, zebras, ostriches, boars, and wild horses, he was an
imitator only of the spectacles of Carus, in which the rarity of the
animals was as much considered as their fierceness.

NINEVEH AND ITS REMAINS.

"For very many centuries, the hoary monuments of Egypt--its temples, its
obelisks, and its tombs--have presented to the eye of the beholder
strange forms of sculpture and of language; the import of which none
could tell. The wild valleys of Sinai, too, exhibited upon their rocky
sides the unknown writings of a former people; whose name and existence
none could trace. Among the ruined halls of Persepolis, and on the
rock-hewn tablets of the surrounding regions, long inscriptions in
forgotten characters seemed to enrol the deeds and conquests of mighty
sovereigns; but none could read the record. Thanks to the skill and
persevering zeal of scholars of the 19th century, the key of these
locked up treasures has been found; and the records have mostly been
read. The monuments of Egypt, her paintings and her hieroglyphics, mute
for so many ages, have at length spoken out; and now our knowledge of
this ancient people is scarcely less accurate and extensive than our
acquaintance with the classic lands of Greece and Rome. The unknown
characters upon the rocks of Sinai have been deciphered, but the meagre
contents still leave us in darkness as to their origin and purpose. The
cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions of the Persian monuments and
tablets, have yielded up their mysteries, unfolding historical data of
high importance; thus illustrating and confirming the few and sometimes
isolated facts preserved to us in the Scriptures and other ancient
writings. Of all the works, in which the progress and results of these
discoveries have been made known, not one has been reproduced or made
generally accessible in this country. The scholar who would become
acquainted with them, and make them his own, must still have recourse to
the Old World.

"The work of Mr. Layard brings before us still another step of progress.
Here we have not to do, with the hoary ruins that have borne the brunt
of centuries in the presence of the world, but with a resurrection of
the monuments themselves. It is the disentombing of temple-palaces from
the sepulchre of ages; the recovery of the metropolis of a powerful
nation from the long night of oblivion.